Posted
on February 12, 2009, 10:33 am,
by Eelko Berkenpies,
under Everything.

A while ago I saw some screenshots of a very hilarious KDE Plasma theme called Fluffy Bunny.

Fluffy Bunny KDE Plasma theme

I haven’t been able to find out who created it, I only found some packages for openSuse with no author attached to it. I find this theme so horribly wrong that it’s actually fun to use. The theme will run fine under KDE 4.2 rebuilding the openSuse’s source RPM. I have been looking for an appropiate license to redistribute it for Fedora but I haven’t been able to find one (yet – I didn’t try that hard either). Therefor I’m looking for someone who know more about this package and if it’s okay to redistribute it for Fedora.

Posted
on February 11, 2009, 2:30 pm,
by Eelko Berkenpies,
under Everything.

As of today I created 2 new pages about Amarok 2 SVN and KDevelop 4 since I want this blog to be more then writing about these two. 🙂 So from now on, keep an eye on those pages for updates and when something really important happens, you will know it anyway.

The KDevelop page got created because of the fact that I noticed my name on planetkde.org today, which is kinda funny because I didn’t expect that. You should read the page for some in-depth info and the story behind it.

About my “journey”, I think I’m getting the hang of the RPM building and therefor I’ll move on to a next chapter, blog-wise. I’m not sure what will be my next point of interest but I think it will be KDE 4.2 related. Perhaps an indepth (screenshot) tour of KDE 4.2 or something.

Posted
on February 1, 2009, 4:15 pm,
by Eelko Berkenpies,
under Everything.

libgpod 0.7.0 for Fedora 10

The latest Amarok SVN snapshot requires libgpod 0.7.0 to build. Since it isn’t available for Fedora 10 (or Fedora Rawhide) yet, I decided to update and older version myself. After downloading the latest source and altering the 0.6.0 spec file, I was able to successfully build an v0.7.0 RPM myself. I’ve put the files up at http://berkenpies.nl/libgpod/ in case you’re interested. Be warned though I had to break my kipi-plugins because it relies on libgpod 0.6.0 but since I haven’t got an iPod, it shouldn’t be a problem for me.

Amarok 2 SVN

As of today another popular 1.4 feature got re-introduced to Amarok 2, and I’m sure it will make a lot of people happy. Cue support is back, hurray! One downside for me personally, I haven’t been able to find any music with a cue sheet yet, so I haven’t been able to try it so far. Below you’ll find a changelog snipplet of what has changed since my latest post.

CHANGELOG (r919623)

FEATURES:
* Cue Sheets are now supported as in Amarok 1.4, plus each cue entry
(usually a track) will be displayed as a timecode on the Progress Bar
with a nice onMouseOver popup.
* Ipod support now uses/depends on libgpod 0.7.0
* Bookmarking specific positions within local tracks and downloaded local
podcast episodes, with a nice visual indicator on the progress bar.
* When the last.fm service is active, any track, from any collection or
service, can be loved from the browser , and there will always be a love
button for the currently playing track, no matter the source

CHANGES:
* Increased width of volume slider for greater precision.
* Use the speex, trueaudio and wavpack support in TagLib 1.5, rather than
our own plugins.
* Doubleclick on a podcast channel appends all it’s child episodes to the
playlist.
* Delete and download actions will only be shown when relevant to the
selected podcast episode.
* Major refactoring of the podcast model and view to allow custom actions
per podcasts source.
* Compilation fixed for the OpenSolaris Operating System

I am working on a way to have automated Amarok builds like the Neon Project (http://amarok.kde.org/wiki/User:Apachelogger/Project_Neon) but for now I keep on building them manually on a daily base. New build are being posted to http://berkenpies.nl/amarok/ so I suggest you keep an eye on that. A friendly reminder, the RPM requires Fedora 10, KDE 4.2 and all the packages that you’d need when building it manually. My next goal is to fine-tune this. Until then, have fun playing with the latest build. 🙂

Posted
on January 20, 2009, 11:08 am,
by Eelko Berkenpies,
under Everything.

[edit] Some of the Amarok developers kindly pointed out that this is just a SVN snapshot version. That means it’s not called 2.1 until a feature freeze. Till that time I will be referring to it as “Amarok 2 SVN snapshot”.

As of yesterday I decided to give RPM building a try. So here’s what I did;

I already have read somewhere, I knew that fetching a previous SPEC file for a RPM should work fine. So I found one that was last edited by Rex Dieter, the guy who maintains the KDE-REDHAT distro’s I am using, for Amarok 2.0.1.1.

At that point I updated my Amarok to the most recent SVN snapshot available at that point (revision 913756), I packed it up and put it in my rpmbuild directory. After that it was just a matter of updating the SPEC file to reflect my changes and building it.

That ended up in me having an Amarok 2 SVN snapshot (revision 913756) RPM built under Fedora 11 (rawhide) on my laptop (which is my plaything).

CHANGELOG (r913756)
FEATURES:
* Dbus methods added: VolumeUp, VolumeDown and Mute. (BR 181130)
* The feed url is displayed in the config dialog of a podcast channel.
By left clicking in the url it's copied to the clipboard. (BR 180853)
* The Playlist Browser can now show playlists from multiple sources,
including media devices.
* The last.fm service now allows for the playing of all types of user
stations (personal, loved tracks, recommendations, and neighborhood).
* Arbitrary Tags can now be played in the last.fm service. (BR 139802)
* Replay Gain support, currently only for MP3, Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files.
* Amarok urls. Amarok can now load and generate "amarok urls" that allows
any "view" to be bookmarked and later retrieved. A protocol handler is
also installed that will launch amarok into the correct state, or make
amarok show the correct view if already running if such a url is
activated system wide.
* Customizable playlist layouts. The playlist is now rendered according to
an xml layout, allowing the playlist to assume a variety of different
looks and supply customizable information.
* Album cover art can be accessed via the scripting API. Patch thanks to
Simon Esneault <simon.esneault@gmail.com>. (BR 179732)
* New vertical Context View layout.
* New applet toolbar in the Context View to arrange, select, and add applets.
CHANGES:
* Show error messages when Wikipedia information or Lyrics are unable to
be displayed retrieved.
* Show the cover menu when right clicking on artwork in the Tag Dialog.
* Don't remove queued tracks from the playlist when repopulating dynamic
playlists.
* Major last.fm UI overhaul
* Progress indicator on system tray icon is back.
* Now using KSystemTrayIcon.
BUGFIXES:
* Fix grouping of Stream and File meta objects. This affects many cases,
Such as when loading a playlist containing tracks from a scripted
service.
* Fixed crash on exit when collection scan has been aborted. (BR 176870)
* Open ogg files in Amarok when using Dolphin and other file managers.
Patch thanks to Lubos Lunak <l.lunak@kde.org>. (BR 180155)
* Fixed an infinite loop bug when using title case conversion in Guess Tags.
(BR 180164)
* Don't show the rating widget for tracks which are not in the collection.
(BR 180023)

Sharing is caring after all so here’s the link to the freshly built RPM which might be useful/interesting to people who like to give Amarok 2.1 (and run Fedora Rawhide) a try. Please note that Amarok 2.1 is under heavy development and things might be broken in this release. So not for the faint-hearted. 🙂

[edit] I now have a Fedora 10 build an a Fedora Rawhide build available:

Since a few days they switched to a new trunk containing the upcoming version 2.1 and I must say it’s looking pretty damn sweet so far. Most of the functions which were left out of the 2.0 release are being re-introduced here (actually the current release of Amarok 2.0.1.1 has quite a few of the community’s wishes granted already).

For a little while the Amarok developers had me scared (and quite pissed off) for a moment, claiming the would do only do their own thing and not re-implanting old 1.4 features (Missing features in Amarok 2). Luckily they proof otherwise for 2.0.1.1 with a search/filter for the playlist, queue support, fixed grouping, and a lot of bug fixes, changes and other features. With 2.1 in the making they seem to really get the hang of it.

At this point it would be useless to do an in-depth review so perhaps I will consider that later during the progress, but at this point it’s already worth looking at. Below a screenshot of the slightly changed main window and the changelog as of r910186.

Amarok 2.1 Main Window

New in 2.1 so far:

VERSION 2.1
FEATURES:
* Replay Gain support, currently only for Ogg Vorbis and FLAC files.
* Amarok urls. Amarok can now load and generate “amarok urls” that allows
any “view” to be bookmarked and later retrieved. A protocol handler is
also installed that will launch amarok into the correct state, or make
amarok show the correct view if already running if such a url is
activated system wide.
* Customizable playlist layouts. The playlist is now rendered according to
an xml layout, allowing the playlist to assume a variety of different
looks and supply customizable information.
* Album cover art can be accessed via the scripting API. Patch thanks to
Simon Esneault <simon.esneault@gmail.com>. (BR 179732)
* New vertical Context View layout.
* New applet toolbar in the Context View to arrange, select, and add applets.

CHANGES:
* Progress indicator on system tray icon is back.
* Now using KSystemTrayIcon.

BUGFIXES:
* Open ogg files in Amarok when using Dolphin and other file managers.
Patch thanks to Lubos Lunak <l.lunak@kde.org>. (BR 180155)
* Fixed an infinite loop bug when using title case conversion in Guess Tags.
(BR 180164)
* Don’t show the rating widget for tracks which are not in the collection.
(BR 180023)

Posted
on December 22, 2008, 9:31 pm,
by Eelko Berkenpies,
under Everything.

Yup, yet another attempt at a blog. This time about open-source software and related topics.

As of this weekend I’m officially running a dual boot machine at home (Fedora 10 -KDE 4.2 beta 2 / Windows XP). At work I’ve been using Fedora for a while now due to some sort of company policy (I work at a Webhosting company – we offer hosting on Linux servers). My co-worker convinced us (= made us all) to install Fedora to better understand what we are working with and he couldn’t have been more right. Working with Fedora made me interested in Linux again. I tried FreeBSD a few years ago – I know, BSD != Linux, but I kinda lost interest due to new interests in programming. Anyway, this weekend it was time to make the switch again. This time at home and mainly because I fell in love with KDE 4.2. The speed, the eye-candy, the possibility’s, widget, plasma, usability are just a few of the pro’s.

Fedora 10

I will be using this blog to post opinions, statements and details about my journey into open-source software which will hopefully end up in writing and/or modifying software for Linux / KDE. Until that time I will bore the heck out of you with useful stuff I run in to.